Surveys are an effective tool for gathering data on a variety of facts and opinions. Surveys can aid many businesses and organizations in defining and/or achieving their goals and policies. A typical survey constitutes a set of questions which are distributed to a group of people having appropriate characteristics. The group returns responses to the questions, and the responses are assembled to determine, for example, average responses and majority responses.
Surveys may be efficiently conducted via computer networks, such as the Internet. For example, a joint project by Juno Online Services, L.P. and Market Facts, Inc. conducts surveys online. Similarly, SURVEY.NET conducts surveys and questionnaires and provides the results online.
In addition, respondents may be paid for taking a survey. For example, TESTNOW.COM, created by Concept test, Inc. asks its registrants to test various web site concepts and fill out an online questionnaire. Payments are provided for each completed questionnaire. Similarly, Feedback Express is a web site at www.feedbackexpress.com that pays Internet users for providing feedback about concepts they review online.
Surveys conducted via computer networks have not had wide success. Such surveys are particularly susceptible to a variety of attacks that compromise the integrity of collected data. Since surveys conducted via computer networks allow respondents to participate remotely, they are unsupervised and may submit random responses rather than meaningful responses. Even worse, an appropriately designed computer program can submit random or otherwise meaningless responses while appearing to be one or more respondents. Since such surveys are not widely accepted, few people participate in these surveys and those that do generally cannot be paid well. This results in a "chicken-and-egg" problem, where lack of respondents causes poor acceptance of the surveys, which in turn discourages respondents from participating.
Businesses could potentially benefit from surveys conducted via a computer network. However, there is always the possibility that a significant part of data collected from the survey will be inaccurate or otherwise untrustworthy.
Accordingly, it would be advantageous to provide a method and apparatus for conducting surveys that reduced or eliminated the above-described shortcomings.